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Saturday, August 8, 2015

A Tiny Review of Ant-Man

When I saw the first trailer, I wasn't too excited. Every Marvel studios movie so at had been great, but this one... well, how were they going to reconcile Hank Pym, a contemporary of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, and an original Avenger, with all that had gone before? To say nothing of the fact that it was Dr Pym, not Stark, who built Ultron. I was still going to see it, of course, just not too hyped.

That changed with the second trailer. I got optimistic, real sudden-like.

Ant-Man was two movies, and neither disappointed. Spoilers follow.

Ant-Man the superhero origin story tells the story of Scott Lang, a recently paroled burglar, looking for work and trying desperately to catch up on child support payments, so he can have visitation with his daughter. After refusing over and over to return to his life of crime, he finally gives in and agrees to do a job. Instead of money in the safe, Scott finds a weird suit. Curious, he plays with it, and finds himself...a lot smaller

Enter Hank Pym. He set Scott up to audition him. He guides Scott by radio through the nightmarish landscape of a world suddenly grown too large for him, convinces him to be the Ant-Man. To help him keep the Pym particles, a technology which reduces the space between atoms, from being turned into a weapon of war.

Which brings us to Ant-Man, the heist movie. I have seen a lot of classic heists- Oceans 11-13, the Italian Job, the Thomas Crown Affair, to name a few. A heist movie has certain elements that make it distinctive, and one of these is the "crew". Scott's crew of likeable ex cons makes the movie as much as his interactions with Pym, Pyms daughter, Scott's daughter, or the inevitable fight when Ant-Man meets the Falcon at the Avengers compound.

This movie is as fun as any of the other marvel studios films, more fun than a couple of them. As a sidenote, it also has one of the greatest product tie-ins ever: